"At Oracle, we believe that SOA is all about the entire, end-to-end, roundtrip experience," said Dave Chappell, Oracle's chief SOA technologist, in opening remarks during SYS-CON.TV's "SOA World Power Panel," recorded at the Reuters Studio overlooking Times Square in New York.

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Chappell's remarks were in the context of a wide-ranging discussion among six leading SOA technologists, who covered everything from data types to customer requirements to testing, governance, and virtualization during a wide-ranging discussion during the 45-minute broadcast. Panelists included Madeline Bayliss (Solstice Software), Jim Mackay (iTKO), Dustin Lucien (Layer 7), David Mavashev (Nastel), Aaron Blasius (Thinstall), and Oracle's Chappell.

Mackay and Bayliss started off the conversation with an overview of testing, or as Mackay prefers to call it, "functional validation." Bayliss agreed with this fundamental point, noting that enterprise customers have serious overall needs that go well beyond a single aspect of the picture. Lucien took up this insight, noting that although his company is known as an XML appliance vendor, he needs to be thinking of the overall challenges his company's customers face.

Thinstall's Blasius noted that his company specializes in virtualization, which drove a deep dive into what virtualization means in the context of software architecture, how it affects the design and delivery of SOAs today, and how companies are using virtualization techniques to address their enterprise IT challenges.

Mavashev reflected on "the importance of visibility into transactions from the business process perspective," noting that SOA environments have grown out of the Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) space, and furthermore that developers and architects often see SOA  as increasing their complexity, yet customers also want to know how they can scale and how can they extend their processes and services.

Later in the broadcast, Chappell succinctly asked, "How are you going to put standards in place so that your whole organization can have some standards and best practices that you can follow?" during a segment that was devoted to governance.

The entire discussion went well beyond any simple synopsis.